PHA-Exchange> Food for a thought made more visible

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 101
 

NGOs: A network of protagonists (and denouncers of the slow progress being made) in human rights work?
 
1. Can the NGO Establishment overcome the North-South-divide or is it just reproducing it at civil society level? NGOs have been accused of being paternalistic and not-sufficiently-radical-in-fostering-human-rights (HR). The heavy pressure from donors to produce results and the brevity of Northern NGO projects have pushed them to often become commercialized, delivery of services-oriented and over-extended. The other side of the same coin is that NGOs of the South are downgraded to mere implementers. 
 

2. Is this a consequence of the fact that it is the educated urban middle-class that provides the decisive actors to these civil society organizations? This fact is, of course, of great socio-political significance. It may, in part, explain the international community passiveness on embarking in decisive HR work. One can only wonder, for instance, how many among the NGO staff still see the causes of many a conflict at the religious and ethnic level rather than at the economic and political level. 

 

3. It is thus not surprising that NGOs have implicit and/or explicit  socio-political missions --despite them seeming to seek the same (?) improved access to services, the same (?) reductions in poverty, the same (?) empowering of men, women and children, the same (?) building of community solidarity and the same (?) promotion of economic development. Different degrees of success in meeting these goals has to be looked at from different socio-political and HR perspectives.results are not the same across the board.and some are meager (or nil). 

 

4. Be it as it may, a reformed NGO Establishment --functioning with a focus re-missioned around the HR-based-approach-- is a potential natural-social-avant-garde-actor-and-strategic-ally in the long struggle for human (people's) rights and accountable governance. 



5. Re-missioned NGOs can increase the proportion of direct democracy being added to the representative-variety-of-democracy which has shown a tendency of increasingly denying citizens their right to decision. 

 

6. From a HR-based perspective, civil society is to be seen as a force able to rekindle long-lost citizen sovereignty (reversing both 'power-abuse' and 'obedience-abuse' as per M. Foucault). NGOs should thus ideally be the people's-mouthpiece-between-elections since NGOs have the potential power to make demands (that politicians take heed-of) by directly intervening in the political process.

 

7. All this calls for consolidating a new legitimacy of NGOs in the political arena (at the same time calling for a new order and for the de-legitimization of an order that violates HR with impunity). But this requires greater visibility; and the majority of NGOs have problems with this. They are poor at, for instance, writing effective press releases and/or fostering media relationships, or doing more visible ethical and political lobbying. Designing effective media campaigns is important, because it helps placing 'HR-as-news' in the context of competition with other news (most often of lesser social relevance). 

 

8. NGOs must not passively wait for abused claim-holders' and non-compliant duty-bearers' HR-relevant-information to be offered to them; they must take the initiative to investigate, ask questions and insist on answers to pass on to the media. This is a much neglected activity if NGOs honestly strive for direct participation in the political process (challenging policies and administrative bottlenecks); This is thus a call for NGOs to cooperate with the critical investigative media (who rightly start from the assumption that power can-be-and-is abused), and to set out to expose such abuses. 

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City                                                           claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn

Mostly taken from D+C Vol 31,  July and Aug/Sept 2004 and Insights 51, Dec 04 (id21, IDS, Sussex).
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